Exclusive: Bill Daley, unplugged

It is a sunny day at the White House with bright light streaming through the gauzy curtains that cover the patio doors and many windows of Bill Daley’s corner office in the West Wing. And so I try to find some underlying gloom.

Daley, the White House chief of staff, will twice in the course of our hourlong interview refer to the first three years of Barack Obama’s administration as “ungodly” and once as “brutal.”

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So do you think, I ask, that President Obama would be satisfied saying, “We did a good job, we did good stuff,” and if he’s a one-term president, “That’s the verdict of history”?

“Nope, no, absolutely not!” Daley begins, shaking his head and then growing more outraged at the thought of a single term entering the president’s mind. “I think he’d be angry! Pissed! Unhappy! Frustrated! No, if somebody said yes to that, that would be crazy.”

But the polls stink.

“Considering the debacle that he came in with, the tough choices he’s made and how there have been few, if any breaks, he says it himself all the time,” Daley says. “He doesn’t know why he’s as high as 44 percent.”

That is supposed to be a laugh line, but, indeed, the RealClearPolitics average of leading polls currently has Obama at 44.0 percent approval and 50.7 percent disapproval.

That is due to many factors, Daley says, and he starts reeling them off: trying to stimulate the economy; trying to save the auto industry; trying to increase the debt ceiling; passing health care legislation; fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and dealing with Syria, North Korea, Egypt and Iran. To name a few.

“It’s been a brutal three years,” he says. “It’s been a very, very difficult three years, an incredible three years. And we are doing all this under the overhang of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. F—k! It wasn’t like all this was happening in good times.”

But good times — well, better times — are possible before November 2012, Daley says. And all President Obama has to do to achieve this is make a startling end run around not just the Republicans but also the Democrats, in Congress.

All he has to do, Daley says, is operate in domestic affairs with the same speed, power and independence that he possesses in foreign and military affairs.

That’s all.

“On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive,” Daley says. “This has led to a kind of frustration.”

The president’s solution? “Let’s figure out what we can do [without Congress] and push the envelope on some of these things,” Daley says.

Daley recognizes that there are three branches of government and the president leads only one of them, but now is the time for him to flex his muscles and show what he can do without the squabbling, ineffective — and far less popular than even he — Congress.